On a Sun SPARCstation, the delay for decompression is barely noticeable, but on the other side, retrieval time can be much faster since compressed documents are often one third of the size of the uncompressed version. Why not save network bandwidth? If you look at the Internet backbone (nsfnet) statistics, you will see that network traffic has increased drammatically in the past two years. Let's try to limit this increase to what is strictly necessary.

I don't know of any PC or Mac viewer that does automatic decompression, in spite of the fact that this is part of the HTTP protocol. If you happen to know of one, please let me know.

Bertrand Ibrahim <bertrand@cui.unige.ch>